mindstalk | Entries tagged with cognitive science

One idea I've seen around is that of one's different selves, having experiences vs. remembering them, and the different valuations they might put on things. I was thinking recently if there's a reflective self as well.

Computer games:
experiencing: cool cool
reflective: (not engaged)
remembering: oh god, two hours on freecol, *again*

sitting in a nice park:
experiencing: cool. maybe I'm getting a bit bored.
reflective: no this is cool and good for us, stay.
remembering: I guess that was nice, memories are vague and non-vivid though.

reading a good book:
experiencing: cool cool cool
reflective (not engaged)
remembering: that was awesome! Let's commit fanfic and tell all our friends! Woo!

You've probably seen those "if yuo cna raed tihs" passages that purport it's really easy to read scrambled words, "all you need is the first and last letters in the right place". But I've noticed that the scrambling on those often isn't that different from the look or sound of the original word, so I've suspected deliberate catering. And I've done some algorithmic transformations instead. See how easy these are!

This one is simply sorts all the internal letters:

"For iacnnste," he tlod Madinrn. "Your mehotr will caeilnrty be both scehkod and saddeend by this dceiiosn. She may eerxt her iceeflnnu. Echits and law aer, as you know, on her sdei. How will you renopsd? To waht eentxt are you wiillng to fnud this cchioe? How mcuh soorrw are you wiillng to casue? How mcuh dadiisn are you wiillng to bare? Selruy, your fdeinrs msut rceiol as you setp benoyd taht wchih tehy feel and know to be peoprr. Your menotr may cdeinosr it ibcemnnut uopn her to aelrt the Saefty Ocffie, and the Saeefits deem it tehir dtuy to ieennrtve."

This was scrambled at pseudo-random. You'll probably recognize it but would you want to read it?

Tihs hbobit was a vrey weod-llt-o hibbot, and his nmae was Bagings. The Beagsgins had lveid in the nbhiougoorhed of The Hill for tmie out of mnid, and ppoele censriedod tehm very rplseecbate, not only bsaeuce most of tehm were rchi, but aslo bsaucee tehy nveer had any adeenutrvs or did ainytnhg untpeceexd: you cloud tell what a Bnigags wulod say on any qteuoisn wthouit the bteohr of aksnig hmi. Tihs is a sorty of how a Bigngas had an avtuenrde, and found hlisemf doing and saying tnghis atgthloeer unetecepxd. He may hvae lsot the nohbeirug’s rcpeset, but he genaid—wlel, you wlil see wtheehr he gniead aitnynhg in the edn.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/584421.html

(Pasting from a registration-only forum)

I've seen discussions here and elsewhere about aphantasia, the inability to have mental imagery. One thing that strikes me is that they've been mostly about reading fiction, about whether some of us are having a mental movie playing as we read. It's the sort of unreachable subjective experience that's hard to compare, leaving open the possibility that at least some people are having the same experience I am but labelling it differently: I would say I have imagery, but also that it's vague and ghostlike, not at all like hallucinating a full color experience. (I'm also not sure how much I spontaneously 'movie' my fiction, vs. sometimes making a deliberate effort to visualize a scene.)

But there are things I do with my imagery which have measurable outcomes. Most trivially and accessibly, I can play out a game of tic-tac-toe in my head, or play it blindfold, and I would be indeed visualizing a board and 'seeing' whether rows are completed, not doing math on a list of coordinates. I can imagine trying to play blindfold chess though I expect I would be overwhelmed by the detail[1]. I can do multi-digit multiplication or long division in my head much as I would on paper, 'writing' the numbers on mental scratch paper and remembering their positions. I've discovered geometry proofs in my head, and I can run a simple orrery of Earth and Moon motions around the Sun, to explain why the phases of the Moon look the way they do or why most artificial satellites rise in the west.

So for aphantasia people... are these things you simply can't even attempt? Or would you do them differently? I can maybe imagine less visual approaches to the arithmetic, and maybe a numeric coordinate-based approach to tic-tac-toe or even chess, but the others seem inherently visual. Naively, asking whether you can do visual tasks seems more definitive than asking how vivid imagery is.

[1] Chess masters are said to rely on high level functional grouping of pieces, and the experiment behind that is somewhat relevant: asked to look at a board and reconstruct it from memory, they do quite well if it's from a real game and thus makes sense, but on random boards they do no better than the rest of us.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/568453.html

I'm healthy enough to feel like studying or reading non-fiction again, and have started this book, on the nature of expertise, and arguing that generally breadth is better than overspecialization.

* Tiger Woods was a golf prodigy from like age 2, but Roger Pedersen came to tennis casually and late.
* Chess and golf are kind learning environments: clear rules, clear feedback, lots of repetitive situations. Tennis less so. Much of human life, even less so.
* Collaborative human-computer chess is apparently more fruitful than I knew. Humans can provide strategy and management that complements the computer's tactical genius. Even fairly inexperienced humans... whereas much of the work of becoming a grandmaster is becoming a tactical expert, something that is now entirely eclipsed by the computer.
* The more eminent a scientist, up through Nobel prize winners, the more likely they are to have artistic hobbies or other non-scientific interests.
* The Flynn effect -- the widespread rise in IQ scores -- is particularly pronounced in abstraction, like Raven's Progressive Matrices, or more abstract words in language-based IQ tests. Younger generations don't do better than older ones on concrete words.

* Luria studied peoples during the rapid modernization of the USSR and found that untouched remote villages were extremely concrete thinkers. They could learn from experience, sure, but categorically refused to answer questions outside their experience. They tended to group things oddly, compared to 'modern' people who would group items easily by color or material, or function (hunting tools vs. prey, say.)

Like a sample syllogism:
All bears in the far north are white.
Novaya is in the far north.
What color are the bears in Novaya?

Villager: "How can I know? I've never been to Novaya!"
Slightly modernized villager: "Going by your words, the bears there would be white."
Modern person: "White, duh."

Of course, syllogisms are at least 2300 years old, thanks Aristotle, so it's not literally a 'modern' thing, but something about education or social complexity.

On the flip side, the villagers were immune to some optical illusions where same-sized circles look different sizes based on what's around them.

Luria's results have been replicated since in other subsistence societies.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/540488.html

In more than one of his books, Daniel Dennett talks about this concept, using it to categorize various kinds of creatures. This is someone's 2 page PDF diagram describing the ideas, but having just read one of Dennett's latest books, I'll give my own spin here.

* Darwinian creatures: essentially stimulus-response automata determined by their genes; what is generated is genotypes, what is tested is phenotypes reproducing in the environment.

* Skinnerian creatures: use associationism or reinforcement learning (called conditioning in lab experiments); what is generated is (initially) random behavior, what is tested is the consequences. Darwinian constraints hopefully keep the creature from killing itself outright before it has learned; with more altricial animals, parents may 'teach' their children by setting up the right environments for their children to play in.

* Popperian creatures: have models of the world good enough to generate hypotheses or imagined behaviors and evaluate them by their predicted consequences. There's a small cottage industry of experiments trying to show whether corvids or apes have insight in their tool use, vs. just using a past library of Skinnerian fooling around. Complicated by, well, how does one get such models? Almost certainly by a childhood or lifetime of Skinnerian experimentation, with Darwinian biases (like expecting object persistence) helping: think of a baby trying to stick things in holes, until eventually learning not just that round holes won't go in square pegs, but 'why'.

* Gregorian creatures: this is where the standard description, as captured on the PDF, loses me. But to me it seems that the next level is obviously language, or more generally, imitation, both of which seem uniquely human[1]. To try to stay on theme, what is generated and tested is other people's behavior, which we can then learn from.

In looking for summaries, I saw mentions of Dennett in some older book proposing a fifth level, of the scientific method. At first I dismissed that as just being a mash of Skinnerian experimentation and Popperian modeling. But note that each successive level 'learns' orders of magnitude faster than earlier levels. Likewise, counting from 1650 or later, the scientific community has learned the world far more broadly and deeply than all the millennia of human civilization before it. I feel it's too simple to say that's just due to scientific method: tools like lenses, good clocks, and the printing press helped a lot. But still, there's a big change.

Some other analogies come to mind. 'Gregorian' learning is like enhanced Skinner: instead of being limited to trying your own behaviors at random, you can learn from other people's behavior. "Did you hear what happened when Bob ate that mushroom?" Gregorian, or at any rate human, thinkers are all about giving reasons for our behavior and inferring reasons for other behavior; science sort of enhances Popperian models with reasons, going from "I have observed predictable regularity" to "I can explain predictable regularity and make further predictions from deeper principles."

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/507598.html

_If a Lion Could Talk_, Stephen Budiansky, 1998.

...then probably we could understand it, but it wouldn't be a lion anymore.

I saw this book mentioned a lot in grad school, when I was doing my own reading about animal cognition and ape language experiments, but I never read it before. It's much more skeptical than most of what I read then, but fairly convincing in its own right. Independent of that is a lot of animal cognition and communication stuff I didn't know.

This isn't a comprehensive review, just a sweep through of stuff that stood out to me.

**

People report anecdotes of animal intelligence, but rarely animal stupidity under similar situations. People seek to prove animals are some defective version of humans, rather than attending to the impressive things animals can do, in effect denigrating what animals are actually like.

"Smart animals" often means the ones who do what we want; a "stupid horse" learns that the right behavior will avoid being made to work.

Importance of 'peripherals': it's easy to confuse a difference in sensory ability with a difference in intelligence. Rats learn smell associations better than visual ones. Then again, animals learn things that tie into their natural behaviors: dogs can easily learn a tone means food, but not which speaker means food.

If goldfish had hands to play with, would they seem any dumber than monkeys?

At a basic non-verbal general cognition level, humans aren't much different from many animals: we can learn lists, keep 7 things in memory, subitize 4 objects. One researcher claims pretty much all vertebrates have the same general intelligence. This is too strong -- apes do seem better than monkeys who are better than dogs -- but as an order of magnitude thing, maybe kind of right.

Humans special because of our own specialized learning system, language -- which just happens to be capable of unbounded levels of abstraction and reference, creating a real discontinuity of capability, of thought about thoughts, intentions about intentions about intentions.

"Unthinking intelligence" -- it takes hard work to find animal behavior that can't be explained as associative learning. It's possible, but hard.

Lots of 'intelligent', adaptive, behavior -- stalking is brilliant for predators. But puppies stalk bugs at a few weeks of age. Instinct.

Evolution is trial and error; at a faster timescale, so is learning.

Utility of intentional stance, or mock anthropomorphism: assuming a behavior or organ has intention or purpose is often productive and predictive, but that doesn't mean a behavior actually is intentional, any more than a heart is.

Many animal calls classified as "food call" or "alarm call" may at root be attention, "here I am", calls. Or for pets, "summon human". Semantics provided by context of use, not the call itself.

Chomsky: "If you want to find out about an organism you study what it's good at. If you want to study humans you study language. If you want to study pigeons you study homing instinct."

Old approach: mentalism, trying to find human thought, even syllogisms, in animals. Later approach: behaviorism, denying anything other than stimulus-response. Even later approach, inspired by computers and cybernetics: cognitivism, looking for mental representations, whatever those might be.

'animats', very simple models that can produce impressive behavior by interacting with information in the environment. "Follow a gradient, or tumble randomly until you find a gradient" for bacteria. Model frog with 3 interacting simple loops, producing complex prey-grabbing behavior. Model cricket that emulated mate-finding behavior with 100 lines of code, plus an 'ear' responsive to the right frequencies.

Horses and chimps can learn to learn, eventually getting faster at learning new discrimination tests. Chimps can transfer 'sameness' to new match-to-sample tests; pigeons can't.

Timing tests on sequential learning tasks, like ABCD, then being asked about pairs like AC or BD. Monkeys can learn 6 items, pigeons 5 and slower; monkeys also give evidence that they've learned a list they mentally run down, pigeons had learned simpler and less complete rules: A comes first, D comes last; BC baffles it.

Counting vs. rhythmic memory: people can easily repeat "Deck the Halls" 'fa la la la la la la la' without conscious knowledge of how many 'las' there are.

Ground squirrels do make different "hawk alarm" and "mammal predator" alarms. They're not semantically random, but have different acoustic properties: the hawk alarm is a high tone hard to locate, or that is even deceptive. Call benefits both receiver (there's a hawk, run) and sender (lots of running squirrels make the caller not stand out.) The mammal call is part of "look, I see you, your ambush failed, go away."

Animal esperanto: across species, high whines convey fear or appeasement, nonthreat; deep growls convey aggression and threat. Exploitation of big things making low sounds.

Key question: not what an animal is trying to 'say' but what it is trying to accomplish. The whole point is manipulation; often that means 'honest' signals, but not always.

Bird song varied because sender and receiver -- and each male bird is both -- have different goals. Receiver wants to judge how far away someone is, and respond if they're nearby. Sender has no reason to be honest, it'd be ideal to make rivals run around responding to fake threats. Songbirds can only judge distance of a song they know, creating an arms race of multiple songs per bird -- if you use a song your neighbor doesn't know, they have to worry you're intruding. Birds in less competitive areas (more resources per territorial bird) have more stable regional dialects.

Acoustically a bark is between a whine and growl, rising and falling in pitch. Many species 'bark' in a general sense, including bird chirps. Content neutral, "I'm here, now what?" Because they mean nothing, they can mean anything. "Follow me", "stranger approaches", "feed me", "let me in", "let me out". Human vowels and consonants are kind of like whines and growls, making words different kinds of barks.

Humans children use words as names, not as requests, much more obviously than any trained animal. Likewise lots of mutual attention games, with pointing and gaze, that even ape mother-infant pairs don't show.

Bunch of undermining of mirror tests of self-awareness I don't want to summarize.

Animal social intelligence often greater than nonsocial, e.g. easily learning a dominance hierarchy but not other sequential relations, or in-group membership but not arbitrary categories.

Training of child hunting behavior by adult predators is impressive in many cases: fairly good matching to the child's abilities. But it mostly seems to be setting up a learning oppotunity for the child; actual imitation is vanishingly rare. Even the famous snow macaques learning to wash potatoes seems to have been serial re-invention; for example, it didn't spread any faster even as the number of washing monkeys grew.

Infant chimps stick twigs in holes, and follow adult chimps; those combined is enough for them to learn that fishing in some holes yields termites. "stimulus enhancement": animals are drawn to places where conspecifics are finding food, putting them in the same situation in which to learn how to get food.

"The things an animal is good at generally do not require three decades of ambiguous experiments to uncover." -- an indictment of "do apes think like humans" research.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/499362.html

I set my workday alarm for 9:30 am. Usually I've been waking up way earlier than that and not getting back to sleep, part of my general insomnia. The past two days though, I've woken up at about 9:25. *hmmm* It's not the first time my brain has shown an awareness of when I wanted to get up and anticipated the alarm.

If only it were so good about staying asleep when I want to.

Relatedly, I noticed years ago, on a day when it didn't matter if I slept through the alarm, that even the faint beeping of a wristwatch was sufficient to rouse me. The much louder sound of a garbage truck right outside my window did not wake me, assuming I was still asleep. So there must be a filter: "this faint noise has intention, respond; that loud noise is just environment, ignore."

If only I could activate that filter while awake. Chance of *getting* to sleep while the garbage truck was active, if I was already awake, was zero.

Also relatedly, I've noticed that if I feel tired in the afternoon -- food coma or something -- and lie down for a nap, not too concerned with whether I sleep or not, I'm pretty tolerant of light and noises, and often do fall asleep for a bit. But "going to bed" at night, I'm much more sensitive to little noises and vibrations, and use ear plugs all the time, and often a white noise generation (because, again, MY loud hummy noise is okay, THEIR faint hum or whispering or beat will drive me up the wall.)

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/496835.html

Long and with some bits you can skip over, but thought-provoking.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/against-facebook/

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/492041.html

So we have these things called artificial neural networks, that learn in a supposedly neurologically-inspired manner. But AIUI, they typically take many repetitions to really learn something. Many many. And sometimes human learning seems like that, like rote memorization.

But other times, we learn with single-instance burn in. And not always because of some great emotional association, or repeated reflection. I had two instances of that yesterday.

First, I was up in Lowell for a job interview, and took the train. Now, I did that a few years ago, when a bunch of us went together to museums there. So as I emerged from the station this time, and looked across the street, suddenly I remembered exploring the park last time, before I'd gone to meet the others (who biked up). It's not like it's a particularly exciting or distinctive park, and I doubt I've thought of it since... but the impressions were there to be recalled.

As were the memories of being daunted and confued by crossing the nigh-freeway streets to get downtown, but that actually was mildly traumatic.

Second, I've been reading someone's Where I Read thread of the Robotech novels, based on the Robotech animated series, much of which I saw as a child. Last night the reader described a late scene where Minmei is seated outside somewhere, and her douchebag cousin-lover-manager Kyle is chugging a liquor bottle, before he finishes it and smashes it in mid air with a dropkick.

And I remember all that! Not well enough to guess who was on which side of the screen, but all of that suddenly seemed vividly familiar, in a way that other described scenes recently haven't. And unlike other remembered scenes -- the firing of the main gun, Roy dying, Max and Miriya fighting/courting, the SDF-1 punching a Zentraedi ship in Operation Daedalus -- I don't think I've thought about or reflected on this scene in the intervening nigh thirty years; it doesn't seem that iconic (though true, raging alcoholics are rare on Saturday morning cartoons, along with many other things distinctive about Robotech.) It's just some scene... that suddenly feels very fresh, after all this time.

I can't prove it's not some false memory constructed in response to the text. But I see no reason it has to be.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/465568.html

Some chatbot supposedly fooled 33% of judges in a topic-unlimited Turing Test. [Edit: doesn't seem to a proper Turing test, i.e. talking to both a bot and a human and having to say which is the human.] Scott Aaronson gives his experience; here's one of mine:

Me: Where are you from?
Eugene: I live in a big Ukrainian city called Odessa. It is on the Black Sea shore.
M: Why is it called the Black Sea?
E: Nice big sea. Not as big as Atlantic Ocean, though :-)
[ I got a different reply the first time, about Ukrainians thinking it was the best sea. Nothing about black. Either way, I'd think I'd pick "chatbot" right here. ]
M: Is the water black?
E: Maybe. I think *you* know the answer. Could you tell me what are you? I mean your profession.
[ another time: Who knows... Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-) ]
M: I write software.
E: I guess, all the walls in your toilet are decorated with MCP and MCSD certificates.
M: No.
E: Damn! Ok then. And I forgot to ask you where you are from…
M: The Midwest
E: Frankly, I don’t understand what you want to tell me. Sorry.
M: Have you heard of Chicago?
E: Never heard. Could you tell me a bit? If I’m not mistaken – you still didn’t tell me where you live. OR it’s a secret?:-)
M: I told you already; there’s a region of the US called the Midwest.
E: You know, I *do* remember that I told you that my name is Eugene – but I still didn’t hear yours!
M: Guess! I’m a boy.
E: Oh, actually, I’d like to meet some girl here… But never mind, let’s continue chatting! Could you tell me what are you? I mean your profession.

[ aaaand we're done ]

Another time, E asked where I lived:
M: boston
E: By the way, my guinea pig urges you should sign their petition about giving guinea pigs equal rights with humans and paying compensations to all victims of medical experiments. I hope you won't deny it!
M: guinea pigs can't have human rights
E: ...wait.
M: Wait for what?
E: Damn! Are you going to ask me about all apparent things in the world? Read the "Encyclopedia for kids". Maybe, let's talk about something else? What would you like to discuss?
M: how many guinea pigs do you have?
E: I have a guinea pig at home. I named him Bill because he squeals like saxophone :-)
M: what's a saxophone?
E: Ok, lets look up in my pocket encyclopedia. They say saxophone - The saxophone is a metal musical instrument of the woodwind family..
M: Do you like music?
E: To be short I'll only say that I HATE Britnie Spears. All other music is OK compared to her.
M: Why do you hate Britney Spears?
E: Oh, I like British pop. It's not so bang-bang-boom like American music. I like the Five and The Pet Shop Boys, but I hate Britnie Spears.
M: Why?
E: Why? Just because! :) If I'm not mistaken - you still didn't tell me where you live. OR it's a secret?:-)
M: I told you already
E: ...wait [seems to crash at this point]

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/399834.html

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-palmer-chinese-youth/

Longish article on Chinese young adults and their relationship with their parents. Their parents survived the Cultural Revolution, and are described as obsessed with security to the point of amorality; lots of bribes, and approval of selling fake drugs to hospitals, and such. The youth are regressing to the secure human mean and want more normal lives and values, and get along better with their grandparents.

"Next door, in prosperous South Korea, with the longest unbroken
Confucian culture in the world, the elderly are poorer, more likely to
still be working, and four times more likely to kill themselves than the
already suicide-prone Korean young. The suicide rate among older
Chinese lags just behind Korea?s, and has tripled in the past decade."

"A Chinese acquaintance of mine, now in his fifties, once described
having to kill his own brother to stop him turning in their parents for
owning banned books."

***

NYC subway rider behavior http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/nyregion/subway-riders-quirks-studied.html

Austerity policies (austerian) may rest on bad arithmetic and accidentally missing data:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/holy-coding-error-batman/
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems#.UW14rDQo2L4.twitter

Myths of Christian persecution and the Age of Martyrs http://chronicle.com/article/The-Myths-Behind-the-Age-of/137423/

URL says it all: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/how-we-got-all-this-great-data-on-american-baby-name-popularity/274989/

***

News is bad for your brain?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli

"In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension
declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why?
Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the
choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an
intentional interruption system"

Transportation options in Jane Austen's world http://www.jasnanorcal.org/ink9.htm

***
Samaritans, the true Jews
http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/religion/jewish-or-not-the-samaritans-celebrate-passover-but-a-month-later
most inbred population

Karaites; also Torah+Joshua only, but use standard Passover date
http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/religion/karaites-who-are-they-and-where-do-they-live
Samaritans pre-Diaspora, Karaites 8th century Baghdad spinoff?
patrilineal
oldest synagogue in Jerusalem
The largest Karaite community in the U.S. (though mostly of Egyptian
rather than Crimean Karaim origin) resides not far from the GeoCurrents
base, in Daly City

Jews of India
http://geocurrents.info/population-geography/the-jews-of-india

Heterodox Zone
http://geocurrents.info/geopolitics/the-heterodox-zone

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/363311.html

On cultural differences in human psychology
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135
58 page research paper PDF: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf

Americans are most susceptible to the Muller-Lyer optical illusion (the one with the double 'arrows' that look different lengths), perhaps from growing up most in boxy rooms, and least susceptible to the Asch conformity result. Worse at noticing background details of an aquarium, better at judging the verticality of a line despite confounding context.

"Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood." “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”

'People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home. Those trying to use economic incentives to encourage sustainable land use will similarly need to understand local notions of fairness to have any chance of influencing behavior in predictable ways.'

'Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places. Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners. Research published late last year suggested psychological differences at the city level too. Compared to San Franciscans, Bostonians’ internal sense of self-worth is more dependent on community status and financial and educational achievement.'

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/358494.html

I just finished Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It is long with many chapters discussing many cognitive biases, making it hard to summarize in my usual "slog through and taken notes" way. Lucky you! It was quite interesting, though. One of those books that makes you think twice about democracy, except as Kahneman has pointed out, there's no guarantee the experts are any better.

One theme is a set of contrasts: System 1 vs. System 2, where 1 is fast, automatic, parallel, associative, and heuristic, basically systems of perception, memory and recognition; 2 is slow, serial, more logical, conscious, able to direct the attention of 1, and lazy. Another is Econs vs. Humans, rational decision makers vs. real people. A third, near the end, is the experiencing self vs. the remembering self. E.g. we tend to remember a painful episode not by the total pain, at least as modeled by a simple integral, but by the average of the peak pain and the last pain.

(So you can subject people to 60 seconds of their hand being in cold water, vs. 60 seconds of their hand being in equally cold water plus 30 more seconds of slightly less cold water, and they will choose to repeat the second experience over the first, because they remember the lower pain at the end, even though objectively it seems an entirely worse experience.)

Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biases_in_judgment_and_decision_making I'm reminded that major ones he talks about are anchoring, priming, framing effect, halo effect, base rate neglect, availability heuristic, endowment effect and loss-aversion, focusing effect (particularly by the remembering self, at the expense of the future experiencing self), impact bias, peak-end rule (what causes the cold water result).

Focusing: if you ask someone in Chicago how happy people in California are, the Chicagoan will think of the climate as a salient feature, focus on that, and expect Californians to be happier. In fact most Californians take the weather for granted, and aren't obviously any happier. Similarly people who don't know a paraplegic will expect one to be pretty unhappy after a year, whereas they tend to learn to cope and have close to normal levels of happiness.

If you ask people how happy they are, the current weather tends to have a big effect. Unless you first ask them what the weather is; then in considering their happiness, the weather is salient and they control for it.

Loss-aversion: given a chance to bet on a fair coin, heads they win $20, tails they lose $10, there's a tendency for humans to avoid the bet; losses are more painful, despite the nice expected value. If offered a chance to bet on the result of 100 coin tosses, most everyone would jump at that. Kahneman notes that this is too narrow minded: life is a whole series of small diverse bets with positive expected value, and it'd be very costly to systematically avoid them just because they look like diverse and unconnected bets, unlike 100 identical coin tosses. This feels relevant to me, who tends to be proudly risk-averse.

Framing: ask corporate executives about a fair chance to double or halve their capital, and most will avoid it. Their CEO would love for them to all take such a bet, as he can see the aggregate benefit to the company. Narrow framing vs. broad framing, and this actually goes back to the previous example: narrow framing is "how do I feel about the potential small loss here", broad framing is "what life policy should I have to such bets in general?"\

"Some people are more like their System 1, others are more like their System 2."

Keith Stanovich breaks up System 2, into an algorithmic mind -- slow thinking and demanding computation, IQ test performance, ability to switch tasks quickly and efficiently -- and a rational mind, or what Kahneman calls 'engaged', which is about reflectivity and resistance to biases, or ability to recognize when biases are likely and thus ability to slow down and think more. Someone can be intelligent, yet highly subject to bias; I couldn't help thinking of Intelligence and Wisdom in D&D.

This book also had the thing I mentioned recently, where asking people to think like a trader changes their behavior (in particular, makes them less loss averse in an experiment), which prompted me to think "f-ck! who would have thought of that as a requirement for human-equal AI? Intelligence is Hard."

***

My subject said two books. I've just started the second one, which is Simple Heuristics That Make us Smart, by Gerd Gigenrizer and Peter Todd and others. You'd think that'd be a similar research program to Kahneman and Tversky's, but there's apparently a fair bit of discord. I'd heard of Todd and his heuristics program back at IU -- he was there and I took a class -- so I recognized him when Kahneman mentioned them briefly in a footnote, saying they focused more on statistical simulation, that their evidence for actual psychological use was limited and disputed, and there for all its flaws, there's no need for System 1 to be frugal; it's built to use vast quantities of information while still being fast. This in 2012.

The other book, written in 1999, mentioned Kahneman and Tversky almost right away, with frequent sniping about how they focus on biases and deviations from a supposed perfectly rational ideal, while ignoring the ecological adaptedness and accuracy of fast and frugal heuristics. I've read a few chapters, and it's been an interesting reflective exercise to watch my biases at work. I liked Kahneman's book and his "no need to be frugal" criticism seemed plausible, so I come in biased against this work. The tone seems pettier, so there's a halo effect -- I don't like that, so I'm disposed to not like the content. And IMO it's an uglier book, particularly in the font, so that's the halo effect again.

As for the actual content, the first part was about the recognition heuristic and their famous example. If you're asked to judge which of two cities is larger, and you don't know, but you recognize that you've heard of one of them, it's a good bet to say that one is larger. Strikingly, you can do better by "knowing less": Americans might have more pairs of cities they've heard of and thus are stumped by, while Germans are more likely to have just heard of the biggest US cities. And they had a computer model that did best when taught the first 23 of 83 German cities that Americans recognized, even with other cues to help decide between pairs of recognized cities. (Basically, those cues were less accurate than just recognition, when applicable.) The next chapter talks about how recognition did better in picking a stock portfolio for 6 months of 1999 than almost any other strategy; they do acknowledge some of the potential pitfalls there.

My response was that yes, the recognition heuristic seems plausible and sensible in that situation (the cities one), but how common is that to the real world? And in their emphasis on "fast and frugal", and desire for clear computational models, they dismiss some alternatives, like familiarity. They seem to say that's too vague to consider, or form part of a research program, yet it seems obvious to me that if I recognize both cities but feel I've heard of one of them more, then I'll bet on that one and likely do well, and that familiarity -- number of associations, sense of prototypicalness, or just vague sense of hearing of it a lot -- should not be out of bounds for a cognitive research program, even if it would take more work to evaluated and model.

I just realized that Kahneman talked a lot about substitution effects -- faced with a hard question, like "how happy are you with your life", System 1 substituting an easier question, like "how happy am I right now". And the recognition effect would be just that. Memory doesn't return the size of a city, but recognition (or familiarity) is something, and can be substituted in.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/347284.html

I'm currently reading this book, on recent human evolution. It's not an evolutionary psychology book, as that capsule description made someone thing, though it probably will be talking about evolution and the brain. It's by an anthropologist and a physicist, which is a bit odd, but nothing's obviously wrong about it so far.

Main idea isn't new to me: that human evolution, far from being halted by civilization, has in fact sped up. See John Hawks, who *is* an evolutionary biologist (longer piece, by him). Basic idea is that more people = more mutations and thus chances to adapt, and new environments, many of them created by us, means new things to adapt to. (Environment also includes new foods and diseases, and things like cities.)

The book structure is a bit odd; it spends most of chapter 2 talking about the possibility of incorporating adaptive Neanderthal genes, something for which in 2009 they had no real evidence apart from some intermediate skeletons in a few locations, not like the recent genetic evidence of Neanderthal and Denisovian genes. (Which might about as a verified prediction, then.) Speculation on incorporating genes, speculation on what we could have gotten out of them... not entirely divorced from evidence, but still odd.

But there's also math. Simple math. A neutral gene variant -- one with no adaptive effect -- lives or dies by chance, with a chance of taking over a population of 1/2N, N being the size of the population. But, per Haldane, an *adaptive* gene which grants one s% more children (a highly statistical measure, obviously) has probability 2s of sweeping a population. So a gene granting 1% more fitness has 2% chance of taking over. Not high for one such gene... but out of a 100, we'd expect 2 to take over.

(I suspect small number simplification; a 50% adaptive improvement can't be 100% likely to take over, though we can expect good things of it.)

Per Hawks, imagine that the frequency of 1% beneficial mutations is 1 per 10,000 people. Then a population of 10,000 will have 1 such mutation per generation, and it'll take on average 50 generations for one of those mutations to start taking over rather than withering away by chance.

But in a population of a million people, there'd be 100 mutations, and so we'd expect 2 mutations a generation to start being fixed. In 1000 years, 100 successful adaptations, rather than 1.

And we do in fact see lots of genes in the process of 'sweeping' populations. Mostly in metabolism and digestion, disease resistance, reproduction, DNA repair, and the central nervous system. The first two have obvious examples and aren't politically alarming, examples adult like lactose tolerance (less than 8000 years old in Europeans, 3000 years old in Tutsi) and malaria resistance (also 3000 years old.) They say skin color might be another one; hunter-gatherers can get vitamin D from meat, so even in the north don't have a big need for light skin, and several light-skin mutations are younger than agriculture. White people may not have existed 10,000 years ago. Europeans and Asians have more inactive variants of an African gene that promotes salt retention -- useful for high-sweating tropical dwellers, less so in cooler climates, and also leading to hypertension in a modern diet. East Asians apparently have various genes reducing the risk of alcoholism, and the authors speculate that the high rates of diabetes and alcoholism among 'indigenous' populations owe a lot to a near total lack of genetic adaptation to agricultural diets with lots of starch and alcohol.

But the central nervous system? That's the *brain*. Suggesting differences there is politically charged in the way that fire is hot. Yet if evolution happened in other parts of our biology, and it did, why should the brain be immune?

They agree that the amount of time we're talking about isn't enough to build up complex adaptations from scratch. But they point out that you don't need to; simple adaptations can still have big effects. There's huge variation in dogs (chihuahua, Great Dane; smart and friendly border collie, dumb basset hound and mean pitbull), just from shifting the balance of traits present in wolves, plus adding something that means dogs are far more attentive to humans (with the pinnacle of border collies, who can learn words in about 5 repetitions.) They don't mention the prairie and montane vole species, where a single gene change means monogamous pair bonding or not. And shifting the frequency of existing genes is far easier and faster than fixing a new mutation.

So even with all humans sharing the same basic mental mechanisms of intelligence and personality, the proportion of those mechanisms in various populations could easily have changed in the past 10,000 years. But you'll have to wait until I read the rest to hear what...

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/338275.html

New article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/consciousness_science_and_ethics_abortion_animal_rights_and_vegetative_state_debates_.single.html
Older one I may have linked to before:
http://www.nature.com/pr/journal/v65/n3/full/pr200950a.html

Between them, current science seems to say that until 29 weeks the fetus lacks the physical brain connections that correlate with consciousness, and they don't really start functioning until 33 weeks. Even then, the fetus is in a state of constant sedation, from various chemicals plus low blood oxygen, and "wakes up" at the first time with birth. The idea that in a world of gray areas, birth is a rare natural sharp dividing line seems to have real merit, not just convenience, allowing principled distinction between even late abortion and infanticide even if you want to discount the mother's autonomy and focus on the fetus/baby.

In a way, the 'soul' really does enter with the first breath.

(From my limited observations, that's still not much of a soul. On observing a friend's 2 month old, slightly pre-term baby, I quipped that he was barely an animal, let alone human, yet. Nurse shit cry sleep repeat.)

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/337325.html

If the brain is a massively parallel computer progammed by self-evolving spaghetti code, are race conditions and deadlock useful concepts for human psychology?